Up in Napa again, for the weekend, I felt summer on the way: the tall spring grasses fading from green toward gold, the grapevines in full leaf, and the blackberry vines now budding with green berries. Last weekend’s rainstorms were gone on by, radish blossoms peppered the empty fields with their white and purple petals, and the odd orange poppy hung on in the better-watered bottom lands. In a few weeks, there will be enough blackberries to spend entire days out picking—I’m going to need an inflatable raft to get to one of the bushes, but I’ll find a way. And I have an idea of what I’ll do with the surplus. Preserves, of course, and perhaps a little freezing, for winter pies, but even more fun will be the blackberry wine I want to try.
The recipe comes from the just-published River Cottage Cookbook, by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. The author of The River Cottage Meat Book, Fearnley-Whittingstall lives in an English country home as a sort of full-time food experiment for his BBC cooking show. He farms, he fishes, he forages, he kills livestock and eats it. And, apparently, he makes wine. The recipe couldn’t be more simple: Pour two quarts of boiling water over four pounds of blackberries, mash the berries a bit, and let the whole thing sit for a few days, stirring every once in a while. Then create two and a half quarts of flavored simple syrup using sugar and the juices and zests from one orange and one lemon, as well as water, and add this to the pot. Now add one packet of baking yeast moistened with warm water, and put the whole thing into a demi-john fermentation jar at room temp for as long as it takes to become hooch. (Two to six months.) The next move is to rack the stuff—pour the juice off the sediment—and let it age for another six months before bottling. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
3 things: (1) before pouring water over the blackberries, submerge them in cold clean water, which will cause bugs to climb out so they don’t drown, and leaves to float to the surface. (2) buy some wine making yeast or champagne yeast from one of our local homebrew shops; there’s one on Clement around 23rd, and one a few doors down San Pablo from Kermit Lynch, which you probably have professional reasons to visit anyway. Baking yeast produces different flavors that aren’t particularly good for drinking. (3) I don’t see the point of waiting a few days before inoculating the berry/water mixture–you’re only inviting bacterial contamination and off flavors. The alcohol will eventually kill the bacteria, but not before it’s made your project less appetizing.
You also shouldn’t need to add sugar.
Hey, thanks for this input. I’m honestly grateful.
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And at the very least put a balloon over the mouth of the demi-john if you can’t fit it with a fermentation lock. Keeps bad yeasties and bacteria from flowing in.
Why not add sugar to this recipe? Any wine I’ve made in the past has had sugar in it and it’s been very tasty. Also have a question for anyone who cares to help: I grow my own fruit-just picked a couple of quarts of fresh strawberries this morning but I’m really looking forward to my black and red raspberries in 3 weeks and July brings me blueberries and my blackberries will be ripe right after blueberries are finishing up. I also have pear, apple and sour cherry trees. My question-I made some real kick-a** elderberry wine a few years ago from the wild berries I found growing along a country road. I ony have that recipe and my Great Uncle’s recipe for Beaujolais and a carrot whiskey recipe he brought with him from France. I don’t have an unlimited budget so where can I find good info on the web and recipes too, for making wine from my blackberries and my Concord Grapes which ripen the end of August. Thanks in advance for any advice.
You’ll want to find a nearby homebrew shop and connect up with them for supplies and classes. My local San Francisco homebrew shop focuses on beer, but they also carry some wine yeast strains and support home winemakers. Many of the supplies (the right yeast, fermentation locks, iodophor sanitation solution, etc.) are pretty cheap and will make a big difference in your ability to control the fermentation in a way that favors the yeast you want and discourages other yeasts and bacteria from contaminating the batch. The alcohol content will get high enough eventually to kill anything dangerous, so it’s not a health concern, just a flavor concern. There are a variety of web site listings that break down shops by area, some web research to find local resources will help a lot; here are a couple that seem to have decent listings:
http://www.beerinfo.com/index.php/pages/homebrewsupplies.html http://byo.com/referenceguide/supplydirectory/
A last word about the concord grapes: I’d save them for juice and jam, they don’t have enough flavor complexity to make interesting wine. Buy a bottle of concord manischewitz and see if you like it before spending a ton of time on the project.
That’s a great cookbook. (Over here a lot of people refer to the author as “Hugh Fearlessly-Eatsitall.”)
My mother-in-law was big on this kind of winemaking. There are family myths about the various neighbors who snuck down into the cellar to get at her fruit wines without being caught (and the ones who were caught are also the matter of legend.)